The automobile is an important part of life. Because commuters, salesmen, managers, and business executives sometimes spend hours each day in an automobile or other vehicle, cellular telephones and hand-held dictaphones have become popular accessories for making time spent in an automobile more productive. Hand-held dictaphones come in many sizes and are advantageous because they can be carried in attache cases as well as the pockets of many suit jackets. If a driver is skilled, one hand can be used for holding the steering wheel and driving, while the other hand manually activates a hand-held dictaphone for recording messages and other memoranda or documentation.
In one prior art teaching, U.S. Pat. No. 4,064,374, a separate hand-held cassette recorder is detachably coupled to a receptacle pocket of a car radio for allowing playback of recorded messages, music or dictation through the radio speaker, and for allowing recording directly from the radio onto the tape. When a driver desires to dictate, the driver removes the tape player from the receptacle pocket of the radio and manually activates the tape recorder portion to initiate dictation. This prior art proposal suffers some drawbacks. The separate manipulation of a hand-held tape player is inconvenient to a driver and lessens driver attention to the road. Additionally, the tape recorder includes numerous operating buttons which have to be operated when recording and dictating making operation of the tape recorder difficult.
A vehicle accessory having a tape recorder and radio receiver integrally connected to each other and contained in one housing would be advantageous because a housing containing the tape recorder can be configured for mounting within the passenger compartment of the vehicle and connected to the vehicle radio antenna. Additionally, in this type of vehicle accessory, it would be advantageous to record directly from the radio receiver while dictating for dampening the background sounds present in a vehicle. Also, any combination radio-recorder should offer ease of operation and minimize manual manipulation of various buttons on the tape recorder.